Paper: National Laws, UPOV, Should Be Revised To Ensure Farmers Rights

The right of farmers to use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds should be ensured through national laws and a revision of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), so the objectives of another United Nations international treaty on plant genetic resources can be fulfilled, a recent research paper states.

The South Centre recently published a research paper [pdf] entitled, “Implementing farmers’ rights relating to seeds,” authored by Carlos Correa, special advisor on trade and intellectual property at the intergovernmental South Centre.

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)’s Article 9 on farmers’ rights grants farmers with the right to “save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed/propagating material, subject to national law and as appropriate.” However, its wording, which came as an outcome of a difficult compromise, “is particularly problematic in terms of effective implementation and compliance,” the paper said.

In particular, it said, “Whereas plant breeders’ rights and biotech-industry patents are defined and enforced at international level through UPOV and all WTO [World Trade Organization] Members must ensure some protection of plant varieties under Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPS Agreement [Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights], Farmers’ Rights are only recognized in principle, and in vague terms, in the ITPGRFA.”

The paper calls for a revision of national laws to ensure their compatibility with the realisation of farmers’ rights, and a revision of the latest version of the UPOV Convention (1991), considered as the most unfavourable to farmers. The paper suggests that a possibility of allowing current or new UPOV members to revert to the less stringent UPOV version of 1978, should be considered.